Meanings as proposals: a new semantic foundation for a Gricean pragmatics
| Authors | |
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| Publication date | 2012 |
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| Book title | Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial) |
| Book subtitle | The 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue : Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7), Paris Sorbonne-Cité, September 2012 |
| Event | 16th workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial) |
| Pages (from-to) | 40-49 |
| Publisher | Paris: Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 |
| Organisations |
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| Abstract |
A disjunction may pragmatically imply that only one of the disjuncts is true. The traditional Gricean account of this exhaustivity implicature is not without problems. Nevertheless, we think that not the Gricean picture itself, but the underlying conception of meanings as chunks of information may be unfit. Starting instead from a conception of meanings as proposals, within the framework of inquisitive semantics, we develop, algebraically characterise and conceptually motivate a formal semantics and pragmatics, the latter still Gricean in spirit.
Among the difficulties we discuss and resolve are the problem of characterising relevant alternatives, the problem of embedded implicatures and the unwanted negation problem. The analysis is extended to a pragmatic account of mention-some questions. |
| Document type | Conference contribution |
| Language | English |
| Published at | http://staff.science.uva.nl/~westera/downloads/Westera%202012-09%20-%20meanings%20as%20proposals%20-%20SemDial%20v3.pdf http://events.illc.uva.nl/semdial/proceedings/semdial2012_seinedial_proceedings.pdf |
| Downloads |
Westera 2012-09 - meanings as proposals - SemDial v3
(Accepted author manuscript)
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